The present invention relates to articles loading machinery and, more particularly, to machinery for dividing a continuous flowing column of flat edge stacked articles into stacks of a predetermined count and depositing those stacks in conveyor buckets preparatory to packaging.
The machinery used to place sandwich cookies into stacks of predetermined count is commonly fed by an infeed chute which directs the flowing column from a horizontal to an inclined orientation. In the apparatus in general use at present, a destacking mechanism removes the cookies one at a time from the bottom of the chute and places them flat upon a conveyor which carries them to a stacking wheel arrangement. The stacking wheel stands the cookies on edge on a pair of inclined rails. A transfer mechanism is provided to move the counted stack into a conveyor bucket which carries the stacks to a packaging operation.
An example of such machinery is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,053,066 issued Oct. 11, 1977, to Joseph A. Lynch. In the apparatus disclosed in this patent and that employed prior to the development of that apparatus, the destacking operation is accomplished by the conveyor 12. This conveyor strips the cookies from the bottom of the infeed chute (not shown) and carries them toward the stacking wheel 17. An overhead conveyor 16 is required to transfer the cookies from the conveyor 12 to the stacking wheel. Therefore, three mechanisms (two conveyors and the stacking wheel) are necessary to transfer the cookies from the infeed chute to the inclined rails.
The size and cost of a machine is influenced by the number of the mechanisms which it contains and the unit cost of the operation performed by a machine can be reduced by reducing both its size and cost.